Landau had another example of a topic made relevant with modern techniques: Spy Movies. He showed a clip of the most recent James Bond flick, Casino Royale. Then he declared that at Sony he wants to "take espionage entertainment to a new level," leveraging the online community expertise and MMO experience that Sony Online has been gathering for years.

The result is a project code-named Vista, "because we pushed it back a year," Landau quipped. It's a massively multiplayer Spy game, featuring an espionage-driven world and both co-operative and player-vs-player gameplay. He says he wanted to build a game where it's okay to wear a tux, and promised "lots of storylines and experiences that are player-driven."

Then he satisfied our curiosity by playing a clip of the game concept. It's still very early in development; the movie was obviously pre-rendered although it looked to me like they tried to use in-game art assets. The characters were thin and muscular, the men hard-jawed and the women lithe. Yes, there were tuxes; there were also catsuits and machine guns. And hot cars with missile launchers, peeling off down cluttered European city streets.

Although Landau implied James Bond was the inspiration, the combat from the demo reel looked more like a page from the notebook of City of Heroes: a pair of spies took down a small army of crazily-costumed street thugs in a lightning-fast hail of machine gun fire and kung-fu kicks. Then an oversized villain who looked straight out of a comic book (or a KISS concert) bashed through a fence to take on the heroes.

A massively multiplayer spy game sounds like a home-run to me; it's a world that everyone can relate to and it lends itself to lots of gadgets and locations all over the planet. That said, judging by the demo reel, Sony will have to find ways to differentiate the game from City of Heroes or Matrix Online. I expect it'll be a while before we see more of "Vista," but I dig the idea.